Conclusion: The Scientification of Religion

The many themes that have been discussed throughout this book have as their common denominator the question of how we can come to a better understanding of religion in the secular environment of twentieth-century Europe. It can be argued that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, religion still presents huge challenges to European identities. José Casanova even speaks of “Europe’s fear of religion” (Casanova 2009; see Kippenberg 2008). Since the rise of secularism and the modern forms of empirical natural sciences in the late eighteenth century, many Europeans have seen themselves as rational, democratic, and tolerant inhabitants of ‘modernity.’ It was broadly expected that ‘scientific’ progress would undoubtedly lead to a decline of ‘religion.’ But this did not happen. RELIGION has retained its individual and social influence and is still a major issue in politics and media today; clashes between religious claims and scientific or atheist counter-claims determine much of the current societal debate.

Theories of secularization, developed during the “long 1960s” (Brown 2001), have dominated academic discussions for decades (see the overview in Swatos and Olson 2000). While from the outset critics have noted the ideological component of this theory (Lübbe 1965; Blumenberg 1974), it remained one of the most important interpretations of religion and ‘modernity’ (as a critique of the ideology of ‘modernity’ see Latour 1993 and 2010; see also Dressler and Mandair 2011). It is noteworthy that the concept of ‘secularism’ itself did not emerge in the eighteenth century; it was introduced later by the freethinker George Holyoake (1817–1906). The ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ may have been relevant concepts in themselves already in Enlightenment discourse. However, their rhetorical charging as ‘secularism,’ i.e., as an ideology that favors secularization and secular philosophies, is a subsequent development. This fact renders links between ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘secularism’ simplistic and problematic (see Roetz 2013, 9–10, with a critique of Charles Taylor’s notion of a “secular age”). The same can be said about the binary construction of ‘the secular’ versus ‘the religious.’ As Lucian Hölscher notes:

Recently, a consensus has emerged among theorists of secularization that the variables that define this cultural process must be adjusted, though scholars draw different conclusions from this observation (see Berger 2012 and the various responses in Pollack 2013). In an attempt to rethink the dynamics of secularization, it has been noted that the ‘formations of the secular’ are directly linked to the ‘formations of the religious’ in processes of religious change (Asad 2003; see also Beckford and Walliss 2006; Taylor 2007; Modern 2011, 1–47; Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and VanAntwerpen 2011). Given the enormous influence of secularization theories, and also of secularism as an ideological program,

Rethinking the relation between the religious and the secular is an important starting point. Such a critique of dominant secularization theories, however, has not yet led to alternative models of interpretation with full currency in to day’s academic debate. We have to conclude that it is still unclear what model of interpretation would come ‘after secularization.’

If we want to move beyond the secularization paradigm, it is useful to start with the observation that the very idea of secularization is more explanandum than explanans: the theory of secularization is itself an integral part of the formation of contemporary European identities. As the material studied in this book makes clear, secular discourses have not brought the end of RELIGION; rather, they have established the religious in a new framework of meaning. The new faces of religion in contemporary European societies are co-produced by secular dynamics. Consequently, it is important to problematize and supersede the clear-cut distinction between religion and the secular (see also Krech 2013 and Bangstad forthcoming 2014). Framed in an analysis of discursive changes, this approach helps to develop a more suitable theoretical grid for understanding the dynamics that have shaped ‘the religious’ in secular environments.

If we change our object of study and look at the entanglements of religious and secular discourses that have produced new meanings and new realities in European societies, we will find a way out of the impasse of secularization theories. When it comes to cultural and political changes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we now can describe these simply as reconfigurations of the religious and secular fields of discourse. It is in discursive re-entanglements and cultural negotiations of meaning that European societies generate the conceptual borders between the religious and the non-religious and between religion and science. Academics have played a significant role in this dynamic, a role that this book tries to understand.

The discursive organization of knowledge about religion in secular environments is what I call the ‘scientification of religion.’ Theoretically, one could also talk of a ‘religionization of science,’ but the discursive entanglements of RELIGION and SCIENCE are historically inseperable from changes in dispositives and the emergence of ‘science’ in its new understanding. That is why I prefer to speak of scientification of religion to describe this process. My analysis has shown that the institutional establishment of new disciplines in the nineteenth century, such as anthropology, classics, Indology, Jewish studies, psychology, and the academic study of religion, led to a professionalization of knowledge about religion that in turn attributed new meanings to religion (as related approaches see Kippenberg 2002; Krech 2002; von Stuckrad 2003c, 279–284). This attribution of meaning resulted in the emergence of new religious identities and practices, such as paganism, new forms of shamanism, astrological practices, environmental activism, or new variants of Jewish mysticism. In a closely related dynamic—and often in direct correspondence with academics from the humanities—natural scientists adopted religious and metaphysical claims and integrated these in their work, resulting in a new discursive knot of RELIGION and SCIENCE—often combined with a reverence for nature—that gained much influence in the twentieth century.

Thus, the discursive generation of new meanings and practices of religion in European societies before and after 1900 was closely tied to intellectual debates and the emergence of new institutionalized ways of organizing knowledge about religion. The transformation of discourses and dispositives that went along with these changes had its core in academic culture, but was by no means limited to these milieus. Indeed, we should abandon the analytical distinction between academic and non-academic knowledge, between ‘science’ and ‘pseudo-science, ’ and between professional and amateur when we study the most important contributions to discourses of religion and science (Alissa Jones Nelson makes a similar case for the distinction between ‘academic’ and ‘vernacular’ as two rhetorically separated forms of knowledge; see Jones Nelson 2012, 1–3). These distinctions are themselves the results of discursive re-entanglements, of ‘border-work’ that determines what it means to be ‘modern’ and ‘European.’ Abandoning the distinctions as analytical categories does of course not mean neglecting their existence; quite the contrary: it means taking their existence and discursive power seriously, but without subscribing to the power of persuasion that is discursively attributed to them. In other words, we should not place ourselves “inside these dubious unities in order to study their internal configuration or their secret contradictions” (Foucault 2010 [1972], 26).

This argument is linked to a more fundamental observation. Throughout this book I have argued that binary constructions such as ‘religion’ and ‘science’—but also others such as ‘emic’ and ‘etic,’ ‘East’ and ‘West,’ and ‘science’ and ‘pseudo-science’—should be abandoned if we want to understand the dynamic structures in which these concepts have gained their meaning. Again, this does not mean that binary concepts are worthless in general terms; it only means that we should not trust their power of explanation and that we should critically investigate the realities that these binaries create rather than describe.

If we leave behind binary constructions as analytical categories and look at them in their function of creating identities through the attribution of meaning, we will have to find a new vocabulary that seems to be more suitable to serve as an analytical instrument in our interpretation of historical processes. The vocabulary that comes with discursive analyses provides such an instrument. Talking of discourse strands, which can be entangled in manifold ways, enables us to see how binary constructions emerge in concrete historical settings, how they are supplemented with other discourse strands, and how they change their meaning and constellation over time. Similar to what Bruno Latour calls ‘networks’ (Latour 1993, 3), these discourses do not have a fixed center around which they are organized; they are a moving target of scholarly analysis, creating new centers in shifting alliances, dispositives, and discursive configurations.

The discursive constellations that I have followed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries clearly demonstrate the strong impact of religious discourses on contemporary societies in Europe. Breaking down RELIGION and SCIENCE into groups of discursive knots that ascribe new meanings to ‘religion’ and ‘science’ is a useful analytical step. Based on the historical sources presented in this study, we can identify the major discursive knots that have determined the place of religion in European culture in the last two hundred years.

My analysis has a deconstructive and a constructive dimension. The deconstruction lies in the critical evaluation and contextualization of what is regarded as historical and academic knowledge. The constructive element is the re-evaluation of discourse strands that together form the cultural place of religion and science in contemporary Europe. This re-evaluation does not claim to present the only valid history of religion and science in Europe; not being an adherent of the representation model of truth, I do not follow an understanding of historiography as a discipline that strives to represent ‘reality.’ However, as scholars of religion we are fully accountable for our constructions of historical developments. It is a gross—though very common—misunderstanding when critics of discursive approaches argue that the analysis of discourse opens the door to arbitrary and ultimately meaningless scholarship. I hope this book has demonstrated that discourse analysis must be based on a screening of representative historical material and not on an arbitrary selection of a few sources that fit the preconceived ‘theory,’ and also that the power of discursive structures clearly limits the ways in which scholars can construct meaningful narratives that convince their discourse community. This is the opposite of ‘anything goes.’

Focusing on discourses rather than the realities they pretend to represent means being careful with the application of analytical categories such as ‘modernity, ’ ‘Western esotericism,’ ‘secularization,’ or any other concept that is used in academic parlance to make sense of the world around us. These concepts gain their meaning only in discursive contexts, and it is in these contexts that we can see their ideological agenda.